Within the Law Part 7

"I have something to tell you, Mr. Gilder," she said, quietly. "Only, I--I sort of lost my grip on the way here, with this man by my side."

"Most of 'em do, the first time," the officer commented, with a certain grim appreciation.

"Well?" Gilder insisted querulously, as the girl hesitated.

At once, Mary went on speaking, and now a little increase of vigor trembled in her tones.

"When you sit in a cell for three months waiting for your trial, as I did, you think a lot. And, so, I got the idea that if I could talk to you, I might be able to make you understand what's really wrong. And if I could do that, and so help out the other girls, what has happened to me would not, after all, be quite so awful--so useless, somehow." Her voice lowered to a quick pleading, and she bent toward the man at the desk. "Mr. Gilder," she questioned, "do you really want to stop the girls from stealing?"

"Most certainly I do," came the forcible reply.

The girl spoke with a great earnestness, deliberately.

"Then, give them a fair chance."

The magnate stared in sincere astonishment over this absurd, this futile suggestion for his guidance.

"What do you mean?" he vociferated, with rising indignation. There was an added hostility in his demeanor, for it seemed to him that this thief of his goods whom he had brought to justice was daring to trifle with him. He grew wrathful over the suspicion, but a secret curiosity still held his temper within bounds "What do you mean?" he repeated; and now the full force of his strong voice set the room trembling.

The tones of the girl came softly musical, made more delicately resonant to the ear by contrast with the man's roaring.

"Why," she said, very gently, "I mean just this: Give them a living chance to be honest."

"A living chance!" The two words were exploded with dynamic violence.

The preposterousness of the advice fired Gilder with resentment so pervasive that through many seconds he found himself unable to express the rage that flamed within him.

The girl showed herself undismayed by his anger.

"Yes," she went on, quietly; "that's all there is to it. Give them a living chance to get enough food to eat, and a decent room to sleep in, and shoes that will keep their feet off the pavement winter mornings. Do you think that any girl wants to steal? Do you think that any girl wants to risk----?"

By this time, however, Gilder had regained his powers of speech, and he interrupted stormily.

"And is this what you have taken up my time for? You want to make a maudlin plea for guilty, dishonest girls, when I thought you really meant to bring me facts."

Nevertheless, Mary went on with her arraignment uncompromisingly. There was a strange, compelling energy in her inflections that penetrated even the pachydermatous officer, so that, though he thought her raving, he let her rave on, which was not at all his habit of conduct, and did indeed surprise him mightily. As for Gilder, he felt helpless in some puzzling fas.h.i.+on that was totally foreign to his ordinary self. He was still glowing with wrath over the method by which he had been victimized into giving the girl a hearing. Yet, despite his chagrin, he realized that he could not send her from him forthwith. By some inexplicable spell she bound him impotent.

"We work nine hours a day," the quiet voice went on, a curious pathos in the rich timbre of it; "nine hours a day, for six days in the week.

That's a fact, isn't it? And the trouble is, an honest girl can't live on six dollars a week. She can't do it, and buy food and clothes, and pay room-rent and carfare. That's another fact, isn't it?"

Mary regarded the owner of the store with grave questioning in her violet eyes. Under the urgency of emotion, color crept into the pallid cheeks, and now her face was very beautiful--so beautiful, indeed, that for a little the charm of its loveliness caught the man's gaze, and he watched her with a new respect, born of appreciation for her feminine delightfulness. The impression was far too brief. Gilder was not given to esthetic raptures over women. Always, the business instinct was the dominant. So, after the short period of amazed admiration over such unexpected winsomeness, his thoughts flew back angrily to the matters whereof she spoke so ridiculously.

"I don't care to discuss these things," he declared peremptorily, as the girl remained silent for a moment.

"And I have no wish to discuss anything," Mary returned evenly. "I only want to give you what you asked for--facts." A faint smile of reminiscence curved the girl's lips. "When they first locked me up," she explained, without any particular evidence of emotion, "I used to sit and hate you."

"Oh, of course!" came the caustic exclamation from Gilder.

"And then, I thought that perhaps you did not understand," Mary continued; "that, if I were to tell you how things really are, it might be you would change them somehow."

At this ingenuous statement, the owner of the store gave forth a gasp of sheer stupefaction.

"I!" he cried, incredulously. "I change my business policy because you ask me to!"

There was something imperturbable in the quality of the voice as the girl went resolutely forward with her explanation. It was as if she were discharging a duty not to be gainsaid, not to be thwarted by any difficulty, not even the realization that all the effort must be ultimately in vain.

"Do you know how we girls live?--but, of course, you don't. Three of us in one room, doing our own cooking over the two-burner gas-stove, and our own was.h.i.+ng and ironing evenings, after being on our feet for nine hours."

The enumeration of the sordid details left the employer absolutely unmoved, since he lacked the imagination necessary to sympathize actually with the straining evil of a life such as the girl had known.

Indeed, he spoke with an air of just remonstrance, as if the girl's charges were mischievously faulty.

"I have provided chairs behind the counters," he stated.

There was no especial change in the girl's voice as she answered his defense. It continued musically low, but there was in it the insistent note of sincerity.

"But have you ever seen a girl sitting in one of them?" she questioned, coldly. "Please answer me. Have you? Of course not," she said, after a little pause during which the owner had remained silent. She shook her head in emphatic negation. "And do you understand why? It's simply because every girl knows that the manager of her department would think he could get along without her, if he were to see her sitting down ----loafing, you know! So, she would be discharged. All it amounts to is that, after being on her feet for nine hours, the girl usually walks home, in order to save carfare. Yes, she walks, whether sick or well.

Anyhow, you are generally so tired, it don't make much difference which you are."

Gilder was fuming under these strictures, which seemed to him altogether baseless attacks on himself. His exasperation steadily waxed against the girl, a convicted felon, who thus had the audacity to beard him.

"What has all this to do with the question of theft in the store?"

he rumbled, huffily. "That was the excuse for your coming here. And, instead of telling me something, you rant about gas-stoves and carfare."

The inexorable voice went on in its monotone, as if he had not spoken.

"And, when you are really sick, and have to stop work, what are you going to do then? Do you know, Mr. Gilder, that the first time a straight girl steals, it's often because she had to have a doctor--or some luxury like that? And some of them do worse than steal. Yes, they do--girls that started straight, and wanted to stay that way. But, of course, some of them get so tired of the whole grind that--that----"

The man who was the employer of hundreds concerning whom these grim truths were uttered, stirred uneasily in his chair, and there came a touch of color into the healthy brown of his cheeks as he spoke his protest.

"I'm not their guardian. I can't watch over them after they leave the store. They are paid the current rate of wages--as much as any other store pays." As he spoke, the anger provoked by this unexpected a.s.sault on him out of the mouth of a convict flamed high in virtuous repudiation. "Why," he went on vehemently, "no man living does more for his employees than I do. Who gave the girls their fine rest-rooms upstairs? I did! Who gave them the cheap lunch-rooms? I did!"

"But you won't pay them enough to live on!" The very fact that the words were spoken without any trace of rancor merely made this statement of indisputable truth obnoxious to the man, who was stung to more savage resentment in a.s.serting his impugned self-righteousness.

"I pay them the same as the other stores do," he repeated, sullenly.

Yet once again, the gently cadenced voice gave answer, an answer informed with that repulsive insistence to the man who sought to resist her indictment of him.

"But you won't pay them enough to live on." The simple lucidity of the charge forbade direct reply.

Gilder betook himself to evasion by harking back to the established ground of complaint.

"And, so, you claim that you were forced to steal. That's the plea you make for yourself and your friends."

"I wasn't forced to steal," came the answer, spoken in the monotone that had marked her utterance throughout most of the interview. "I wasn't forced to steal, and I didn't steal. But, all the same, that's the plea, as you call it, that I'm making for the other girls. There are hundreds of them who steal because they don't get enough to eat. I said I would tell you how to stop the stealing. Well, I have done it. Give the girls a fair chance to be honest. You asked me for the names, Mr. Gilder.

There's only one name on which to put the blame for the whole business--and that name is Edward Gilder!... Now, won't you do something about it?"

At that naked question, the owner of the store jumped up from his chair, and stood glowering at the girl who risked a request so full of vituperation against himself.

"How dare you speak to me like this?" he thundered.